PMO attacks Postmedia reporter
Questions credibility of ‘controversial’ Maher
OTTAWA — In an unusual, if not unprecedented personal, public attack against a journalist, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s office has questioned the credibility of one of two reporters who first broke the story about alleged election spending irregularities by a Conservative MP.
Harper’s office issued a statement through embattled Conservative MP Dean Del Mastro’s office Thursday in response to an Ottawa Citizen / Postmedia News story published Thursday reporting RCMP officers had stepped in to help Elections Canada investigate the MP’s 2008 election campaign spending.
The PMO’s statement, sent to a newspaper in Del Mastro’s Peterborough, Ont., riding, referred to Postmedia’s Stephen Maher as a “controversial reporter.”
The statement read: “It is worth keeping in mind that Postmedia recently retracted a story written by controversial reporter Stephen Maher because it made false claims against a Conservative riding association.”
Maher’s story, published in November, was about donations to Conservative party donors in a Montreal riding. It was not retracted but was subject to an editor’s note under the label “For the Record.”
In a confused back-and-forth Thursday, Del Mastro’s office first said the statement had come from the PMO, and after initially refusing further comment the MP later changed his mind.
“They’re my statements,” he told the Peterborough Examiner. “I did not write them. I agree with them.”
Christopher Waddell, director of Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communications and a former Parliament Hill reporter, said the statement was “kind of juvenile” and represented an “amateurish” view of news media.
“What’s controversial about him?” said Waddell. “What’s controversial about someone who writes tough stories and asks tough questions? That’s part of the job. If that’s controversial, we are at a pretty sad state in our perceptions of what journalism is all about.”
“If this has happened before,” he added, “it’s very rare and most public relations people would say it’s neither sophisticated nor effective. Even if you go back to the 1980s, there were journalists Brian Mulroney liked and some he didn’t like, but I never recall him singling them out publicly.”
Waddell criticized the government’s communications approach.
“For a government that’s supposedly good at communications, they seem to have a lot of trouble communicating a lot of things,” he said. “Whether it’s this, or getting involved in Africa or Haiti — you can run down an endless list of people saying different things at different times that are contradictory.”
Ottawa Citizen editor-in-chief Gerry Nott called the PMO’s personal aspersions against Maher “quite appalling and surprising.
“That the PM’s office would deal with the issues around the Del Mastro story by looking at concerns they had about a previous story suggests to me they are either trying to deflect or have their eye on the wrong ball.”
Harper communications director AndrewMacDougalldidnotrespond to a Citizen request for comment.
Stephen Maher told the Citizen: “I don’t consider myself to be controversial.”